


NARCISSUS

by amurgin



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, BrOT4, Drama, F/M, M/M, Noctis swears a bit ok, Spoilers, also there's gonna be some sort of smut eventually, basically Noctis loves everyone, coarse language, eyes emoji, massive spoilers, soft smut, this is probably going to get updated with each new chapter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-10-08 07:39:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10381782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amurgin/pseuds/amurgin
Summary: How could he accept giving up his life when he'd barely lived it in the first place?Noctis awakes within the Crystal, having to come to terms with the fact that his life is quickly nearing its end. Bahamut needs him to understand what sacrifice means, but most of all, he needs the young Prince to willingly step up and be crucified, to drive nails into the palms of his hands, himself.Nevertheless, Noctis is not prepared to be the Messiah the world needs.





	

 

_Free-falling._

He's collapsing into a cosmic sheet stained with glittering blues, purples, and greens. Somehow, it's like he's back to being a child – spilling crayons on a blank sheet of paper, or dropping paint on his hands and then clapping them against every surface he can reach before getting caught and scolded. Sometimes, he’d tear sheets off their beds and paint them for hours. He’d hide in them, and when a maid finally figured he had gone missing, he would pop out from a closet or cupboard and pretend to be a shooting star falling off a muddied rainbow sky. But he's not a kid anymore. Or maybe he is. Maybe all this time has passed and he's got nothing to show for it, nothing other than a pile of breathless bodies beneath the red soles of his shoes.

_Still falling._

A weary body of only twenty drops from sky into sky into sky into sky – _neverending_. He feels lighter than a tear, but his body weighs heavy years of regrets and grief. Yet, with each passing breath, they fade farther and farther away until he begins to wonder if all that is even real. Let it be a nightmare, and if it isn't, let this be a neverending dream.

_Gather strength, O Chosen._

Lightning crackles in his spine and thunder rumbles in his chest. The booming voice gets trapped in his head, it reverberates off the rough ridges of his skull and echoes loudly. _No, don't wake up._ He doesn't want to wake up.

_The fate of this world falls to the King of Kings,_

_God, please, just a second longer. Just, please–_

_His Providence consecrated in the divine Light of the Crystal._

Noctis is back to being a child. He's back to sitting at the dinner table, solitude on his right, silence on his left, and the fading image of a father, _no_ , a King facing him. They join hands and pray before eating. The perfect family portrait.

He feels his spine sink into a soft bed, head embraced by a pillow of warmth. He remembers hiding tears in his pillowcase. He remembers waking up with swollen eyes, sleep deprived, and with sticky dryness running down his cheeks in uneven streams. That's how he wakes up now, in the palm of Bahamut, and a strange familiarity shakes him to the core, makes his hair shoot upright.

_So it is ordained – the revelation of Bahamut._

Eyelids quivering open, his eyes grow wide as he takes in the gargantuan Astral looming over him. The words begin to register, and Noctis feels his throat tighten. This is no dream. This is the real deal. His skin tingles when he remembers being pulled in by the Crystal, the portrait of a contorted face dwindling with each struggling grunt roaring in the back of his throat. _How ironic_. It must run in the family, presences that evanesce out of distance. There's a bitter taste in the back of his mouth, and he's back to wanting to scream his throat raw, but he holds himself steady and tilts his head back to face the great Draconian.

The Astral watches him through glass marbles, and if Noctis didn't know any better, he'd say there's condolence glittering off his glaucous irises. There's thick silence between them, but Noctis's ears ring loudly with the possibility of all his thoughts materializing into sound. He wants to tear it apart, with swords or daggers or his bare hands, if needed. So, he let's his voice pierce it like an arrow, shooting it out of the cavernous depths of his body with a force he never knew he held.

"What is this place?"

_The heart of the Crystal, wherein lies the soul of the star, and it is in this place that the King will gain the power to fulfill his calling._

Noctis turns to look at his surroundings. He notices the vast expanse of this sky, ground, and ocean that meld together into one, and he feels lost again. He notices the stars falling like raindrops all around him, but they're falling upwards. His eyes jump around from one body to another, and he traces their eternal journey back to wherever they came from, to wherever _he_ came from.

_By the covenants awakened, the Six have seen the coming of the prophesied hour - a time when the Crystal shall have shed the entirety of its Light unto the ring._

His heart wrestles with his ribs, and he struggles to keep himself from yelling that he doesn't care, that this isn't what he wanted, that it's not fair. Noctis chews on his lip while listening to Bahamut tell him what he's been hearing time and time again. Same crap, different voice.

_Only then, once the sacred ring is replete, can the True King complete his ascension. And only by the True King's hand can the immortal Accursed be banished and the Light restored to this world._

Gaze dropping, he shakes his head in feigned disbelief. He doesn't want to believe that this is all that's left for him. Eyes clenched shut, he tries to run away from a reality that haunts him. He doesn't want to see it any longer. The palms of his hands feel cool, dampened by sweat, but his feet are burning as if that same sweat is acting as fuel. And God, he wants to run far, far away from his father's shadow, from the shadow of every Lucian king that's been chasing him since before he had even been conceived. Slowly, the fire spreads through his whole body, making his stomach boil and bubble over with anxiety, his blood carrying coal, not oxygen, to every organ waiting to be set ablaze.

Scream. _Scream_. Every bone in his body aches and he wants to scream for his mother, for his father, for Luna – _dear Luna_. He tugs at the deepest parts of his mind, memories repressed and buried underneath camping grounds and tire tracks. Noctis misses the sound of their voices just as much as he despises the sound of Bahamut's. He let's Lunafreya's tongue intoxicate his mind, but what he hears differs greatly from what she speaks.

_I died for you. I died for you, Noctis._

Apologies pool in his mouth, and he swallows the saliva back. He swallows his words, always unable to get them out. They slide down his throat, but they get stuck in the cramped up space, and he feels them cut clean his esophagus like a knife slashing through meat. _Silent_. Noctis has always been silent. Regis creeps up behind him, a blurry silhouette from what seems like so long ago.

_We died for you. We all died for you, Prince Noctis._

Had he known, sitting upon his throne, bidding him farewell, had he known that he was killing him? Did Regis know that his voice hung around Noctis's neck like a noose, that his words wrapped around his throat like a pair of wrinkled hands, skin tight around crumbling bones? Sometimes, Noctis wished Regis's sword had found its target between his lungs, son on one end, father on the other – forever bound to one another. But then, he jerks awake with remembrance, and the images of both Regis and Luna burst into stars before falling to the sky.

"Where are my friends?"

The Astral muses for a moment before his words begin to spill anew. They wash over Noctis, who watches him with a crease in his brows. A single second longer and he's sure his heart's going to rip a hole in his chest.

_They stand against the darkness and abide in hope, sustained by faith unfaltering that their King shall arise and bring deliverance._

He wants to sigh in relief, but there is no relief to be had. His body stands frozen in one spot, spinal cord perked up, tense. It hurts, and he's just so damn tired. Noctis hoped Bahamut's words would ease his mind, if only for an instance, yet they do not. The crown lays heavy on his head, and all he wants is to tear it off. This isn't what he wanted. He never asked for this. He doesn't want to save them. He doesn’t want to save anybody.

All he wants is to go back to a time he can barely recall. He wants to feel the glowing embers of the fire warm his face, not burn it whole. He wants to feel his stomach rumble with laughter, not with fear. He wants to go to sleep with the light from the camera's display dancing atop his eyelids, to know the comfort of having a big brother tower above your open back, to hold in the palm of his hand the life of one who steps only in the Prince’s footprints. He's lost everything, left to walk a solitary path all on his own. A breeze brushes against him, and he thinks about his empty hands and the terrifying darkness. He's still sitting at the empty dinner table.

"Who is 'the Accursed'?"

His voice, a whisper, and he thinks he knows the answer, but he asks anyway. Noctis wants to know why his family is bent on seeing him dead.

_A man cursed with life eternal, whose immortality stems from the selfsame scourge that wrought the daemons. One so impure of body and soul was deemed unworthy of the Crystal's Light, and forbidden to ascend. His mind twisted by spite and bent on revenge, the Usurper came to bring darkness down upon the world._

Furrows in his brow, Noctis thinks of interrupting, but silence grabs hold of his empty hand and guides his steps. He remembers Ardyn's parting words, and tries to piece them together with Bahamut's. They don't fit. The picture he's been hearing is made of jagged puzzle pieces, and at the center of it all, the prince sees himself lost in the edges. He doesn't fit either.

An eternity of malice and contempt casts its shadow on him, and his feet submerge into tar-like pools of retaliation, pools swamped by daemon blood and guts. But, before he can hide in the confines of his agitated mind, Bahamut's voice wraps around his waist and drags him back out. They'll never let him escape.

_Only the True King, chosen by the Crystal and guarded by his forebears, can end the Accursed's madness._

"Chosen", "True", "King" – all words that don't suit him. He responds to them out of sheer habit, but he does not see himself within their reflection. Noctis wants to deny it all. Let Ardyn have it. Let him have the throne, the kingdom, the glory they attached to this suicide mission like it's meant to make you eager to jump off a cliff. Maybe they're right. Noctis feels like jumping right about now. He wants to feel his bones crack against the rugged ground and tear his flesh open from the inside.

His mind churns, and churns, and churns, gears grinding roughly against gears. They overlap, scraping each other with a loud screech, and his stomach's turning again, bringing screams drenched in acidic bile to the back of his throat. He thinks about the fact that this might have all been avoided if only they had given Ardyn what he wanted. Did he not save all those people? Did he not do their bidding? Of course he had gone mad with resentment. All his life, his hopes, his aspirations sacrificed for the sake of others instead of having been awarded to him.

_It isn't fair! It isn't–_

His body jumped ever-so-slightly, and a sudden, short breath caught itself onto the tip of Noctis's tongue. Shocked, he looked up at Bahamut, his eyes frantically searching for invalidation in the Astral's. Instead, he found Ardyn lurking in his reflection.

It was at that moment, after his organs had kept on boiling indefinitely, that a spark detonated it all. Rage surged from the tips of his toes to the ends of his hair. He wanted to shout at Bahamut, but his body grew numb and weak with the heat. The words swam around his mouth teasingly, mocking him for never having the spine needed to stand up for himself.

_Fuck you, Bahamut. Fuck Providence. To hell with it all!_

Silence.

_Instead_

"What is 'Providence'?"

_It is the sole means to ending the Immortal Accursed. A power greater than even that of the Six, purifying all by the Light of the Crystal and the glaives of rulers past. Only at the throne can the Chosen receive it, and only at the cost of a life: his own._

He wishes for the hand that holds him to enclose around him, to squeeze him to death, grind him to paste. His jaw tightens, and his teeth shake against one another. Break, _break, break it all!_ A sharp ache shoots from his mouth all the way to his head. It stings, but nothing hurts like knowing that this is it. This is the beginning of the end.

Of course he knew. Part of his brain screamed at him for not running away, for not trying to stop it. Noctis had been complacent. He thought he'd come out unscathed, that everything would come to a quick and clean conclusion. But this journey had gone by so slowly, scorning him constantly. Why did he ever think he'd live to see this through? The truth is that he hoped. He hoped gluttonous fate had had its fill, that it was satisfied with the King and with Luna, with Ignis's eyes, and the whole of Insomnia. They had already paid the price. But Noctis hadn't. It was his turn.

_The King of Kings shall be granted the power to banish the darkness, but the blood price must be paid. To cast out the Usurper and usher in dawn's light will cost the life of the Chosen. Many sacrificed all for the King; so must the King sacrifice himself for all._

Bahamut just had to have an answer for everything. Noctis kept his hands balled tightly into fists, and they hurt, but none of it mattered right now. He felt his eyes well up, vision growing blurry, and he tried to bite it and swallow it and shove it back down. Still, there was nowhere left for him to hide it. Noctis spilled, a bucket filled to the brim, a can of beer knocked over. Frustration cascaded down his cheeks, teardrops pulling away from his skin. They hovered around him before joining the falling stars. He watched them longingly, wishing to be carried away with them.

The Astral saw all– the Prince’s trembling legs, his shaking shoulders, his desperate wish to cling on to life. Noctis wanted to fall to his knees and beg for his life. He imagined it in great detail: his forehead pressed to the ground, pleading wails hacked up by a convulsing body too weak to carry the burden. He also imagined Regis’s eyes tearing holes in his back, but that did not keep him from wanting to implore Bahamut. So, Bahamut dropped him.

_No. No. Please, God, no!_

He reached for stars, for skies, for Gods, but the Astral made no attempt to save him. Bahamut simply watched him fall, hand stretched towards the Draconian.

_Now enter into Reflection, that the Light of Providence shine within._

Realization settled in, and with resignation on his face, Noctis let his arm fall to the side. Like this, he kept on falling, cast into the depths of the crystal and of sleep. What followed can only be said to resemble a neverending dream, one that he hopelessly wished for. Visions of his past, memories, cradled him. Time became a stranger, a man you see out of the corner of your eye, and he seems familiar, but you can’t quite place where you know him from. Warmth and comfort wrapped around him like a blanket as he sank deeper and deeper, and Noctis was swallowed up whole by an eternal stream of life, _his_ life. 

**Author's Note:**

> There were a few things bothering me about the Crystal scene, so, after churning theories for a while, I figured I'd write my thoughts down aka I am so sorry, but I'm dragging you all down with me ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
> 
> edit edit: long story short, chapter 2 is about 11000km away from me and I have no access to it, so--SOON!! It'll be one of the first things I do as soon as I get back ;u;


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